In business activities, e-mail is one of the most routinely used communication means. Generally, a user sends/receives several to some tens of e-mails, or even some hundreds of e-mails, on a daily basis. The user needs to quickly determine the degree of importance of each received e-mail for smooth progress of work. To scrutinize the contents of each of a great number of e-mails, however, takes considerable time and labor.
E-mail users are making great efforts to save such time and labor by skimming or skipping through the e-mail texts, or reading only the beginning parts thereof. Particularly for a user who receives broadcast e-mails, it is very difficult to determine the degree of importance of each received mail, because a broadcast e-mail contains a plurality of messages, which are addressed to different destinations and are arranged at random.
Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2007-47963 discloses an e-mail system for broadcast, which allows a mail sender to designate an important part and a not-important part in a send mail for each of a plurality of mail receivers, so that each mail receiver can readily determine the important part in the received mail (Abstract). For example, in broadcasting an e-mail to a plurality of destinations, the mail sender can designate, for each destination, whether a predetermined item in the mail text is to be highlighted or made invisible in the mail sent to that destination.